Unless you’ve been on an African safari during the entire month of October, you’ve probably noticed the dramatic shift in market tone. What has been working for the majority of the year has stopped working. The low-volatility, bullish setups playbook has been rendered ineffective in just a couple short weeks. As many of us were recently reminded, and many of you might be learning now for the first time, when market regimes change — the process is usually swift, messy, and confusing.

If you’re a long-only swing trader in this market environment, good luck. You’re probably in for a wild ride. As I mentioned in a previous post, bullish moves within the context of a corrective or bear market can be incredibly powerful, sucking in all the stuck shorts and the me-too longs, only to stall and reverse hard later. There is absolutely money to be mind, but it will be a survival of the fittest, most nimble and active traders.

Luckily for us, the ability to design spread trades with options affords us the flexibility to participate in any type of market environment. Are you bearish? — there are bearish plays for that. Is Volatility high? — there are ways to exploit it. Is the market headed into a sideways chop zone? — Delta neutral strategies have got you covered.

In the latest episode of the Trading With @Chicagosean Podcast, I tackle the need to be flexible, the challenge of adapting to fast changing markets, and some strategies I expect to employ if we are in fact about to be entering a sustained period of volatile chop and/or a declining market. Have a listen here, it’s only 10 minutes long: